The digital media industry has evolved greatly within the past several years. Today, users enjoy the ability to access a tremendous amount of media content, such as music or videos, at any location or time of day, using a wide variety of computing systems, personal handheld entertainment devices, or other types of user device.
With the availability of reliable high-speed Internet connectivity, and advances in digital rights management, many users now stream media content, on demand, from other peer devices or from remote servers.
Such users expect their media streaming experience to be comparable in functionality and performance to that of a locally-stored media environment. However, streaming over a network necessarily requires communication of information to initialize the media stream for playing. Such initialization can result in a noticeable and unsatisfactory delay in the user's listening or viewing experience. These are generally the types of environment in which embodiments of the invention can be used.